Friday, November 7, 2014

The Night My Dad Was Saved From Zombies By C.P. Stringham

Looks as if my Broads of a Feather blog post will be on the shorter-side this week.
So many events came up since my last post that I figured I’d have numerous
topics to write about. But I got nothin’. Maybe everything is all log-jammed
up. So much going on that I wouldn’t know where to start—or end for that
matter. I’ll wedge one of those metaphorical logs free and see which topic wins
out…

Christmas past with my parents.

My dad recently spent two weeks in the
hospital. What started as a nasty bout of pneumonia (which can be
life-threatening to those of advanced age and diabetic), turned into something
else entirely within the blink of an eye. His initial ER blood tests revealed
elevated cardiac blood enzymes. The doctor said they were in what they referred
to as “the gray area” between normal and heart attack. Further tests revealed
it was the infection that caused irreversible damage to his heart. Monitoring
also revealed he was in arterial fibrillation or A-Fib. From the Cleveland
Clinic Webpage:

What happens during
AFib?

Normally, your heart contracts and relaxes to a regular
beat. In atrial fibrillation, the upper chambers of the heart (the atria) beat
irregularly (quiver) instead of beating effectively to move blood into the
ventricles. About 15–20 percent of people who have strokes have this heart
arrhythmia.

It’s possible my father was having
symptoms of A-Fib for at least two months before he developed pneumonia. He had
complained about being tired all the time which led to inactivity and brought
the onset of infection. While in the hospital, he told my mother he had felt
winded lately. Hindsight. The pneumonia left relatively quickly after juggling
IV antibiotics. However, the medication prescribed to regulate his heart rate
was unsuccessful. His team of cardiologists recommended electrical
cardioversion, but a transesophageal echocardiogram revealed a blood clot in
his heart, so they couldn’t do the procedure at that juncture.

He’s home now. My mother is monitoring
his medication vigilantly since he has a habit of forgetting whether he’s taken
things or not—which can’t happen anymore. His blood sugar is another issue.
They are working with an endocrinologist to regulate his insulin intake. In
four to six weeks, they will have him in again for another TEE to see if the
medication he was prescribed eliminated the blood clot while trying to regulate
his heart rate the best they can.

My kind of hospital stay! Web photo.

Dad’s hospital stay didn’t go without
incident. The normal hospital-related stuff went on. Getting the family all on
board, making potentially dangerous decisions for treatment, and just the
normal grind of everyone’s life being disrupted from commuting back and forth
to the hospital. The most bizarre incident came about with my dad’s first
roommate on the cardiac floor. He’d had open heart surgery to repair a heart
valve. Nice guy. Loved reading. Although we don’t share an interest in the same
genres, we talked books. He loves horror and, more specifically, all of the
zombie-based stories that are out. All in all, he was a nice guy. My dad’s
second night of sleep was interrupted around 2am when his roommate had a night
terror. Scared the hell out of both of them. By the third day, as my husband
and I were leaving before lunch, he said to me, “Your dad’s roommate is going
through withdrawal.” I didn’t see it, but my husband has seen addiction
behavior before in a family member. He told me about everything he’d witnessed
that helped him draw his conclusion. All of which made sense. That evening,
after a particularly hard afternoon at the hospital, my mom stopped in on her
way home. Part of her anxiety was explained as she told us how Dad’s roommate
was brought beer because the surgeon “prescribed” it with his lunch. The
patient had apparently revealed to his nurse that he was an alcoholic and
having a difficult time with it as he convalesced. That meant he was detoxing
while recovering from heart surgery. He was given another beer with his dinner. At one point, since he wasn't eating and had only drunk his medicine, he started falling and my mother had to rush to catch him. Otherwise, he would have fallen against his bed's footboard. God forbid he crack open his chest! What my mother described sounded like something from an episode of House, MD. My mom didn’t get the reference because she’s
never watched the TV series. As my husband and I explained to her, the medical
team had to treat his heart recovery and that couldn’t be done while he was
detoxing. Withdrawal would make everything more difficult. From a Huffington Post article:

"Doctors sometimes order beers for patients who are going through withdrawal. The kitchen staff places on the trays whatever doctors order, and sometimes they order beer. A lot of patients get it, said the staffer, because doctors think they need it. Not usually throughout their whole stays, but at least at first."

Meme based off of The Walking Dead from The Nerdy Nurse Webpage

The next morning, we
arrived early so we could see my dad off before his TEE since the game plan
was, if the TEE revealed no clots, he’d receive the electrical cardioversion.
Only, when my mom, who got to the hospital ten minutes ahead of my husband and
I, found my dad’s hospital room was empty. My dad’s bed was even missing. Panicked,
she searched for a nurse. The nurse told her my dad had to be moved to another
room and took my mother to him. After the nurse left, my dad proceeded to tell her
how his roommate had a very bad night. Fact of the matter was, his roommate was
almost delusional. At 11pm, he woke my dad up to tell him that he was going to
save both of them and that there was nothing really wrong with them. The
hospital was holding them there and they were going to be sacrificed in the
morning. They were going to throw them into a fire and burn them. He assured my
dad again that he would save him because he knew what to do. Then, he began
sneaking around the room to look for zombies. Checking behind curtains, in
closets, and the bathroom before locking himself inside. Dad said his roommate
was so sincere that, at one point, he was starting to question the whole zombie
thing. My dad is always able to joke in a time of crisis. He rang for the
nurse, told her what was going on, and then she got others to come and help
coax his roommate from the bathroom—although it took forever. Meanwhile, two
nurses came in, grabbed Dad, bed and all, and wheeled him into another room.
Preferably, one that was zombie-free. What a night!

(Video clips from Fox TV's House, MD)

I know what you’re thinking; I made it
up. I assure you, this really happened. Truth is stranger than fiction as the
old cliché goes. Do any of our Broads of
a Feather readers have a crazy hospital stay story? Robin and I would love
to hear about it in the comments section below!

2 comments:

My father was in and out of the hospital all the time when I was growing up. One night he called home in the middle of the night to tell Mom she had to come get him because a tornado had gone through and torn up the hospital (not sure if I remember this on my own, or just my mother's retelling) Needless to say she told him to go back to bed and hung up on him!